The Walking Dead midseason premiere airs this Sunday, and speculation is running wild that our favorite group of zombie apocalypse survivors will be making their way to the Alexandria Safe Zone from the comics in the back half of the season. Now, showrunner Scott Gimple has heavily hinted (read: stopped just short of confirming) that this is, indeed, where the group is headed after the tragic events of the midseason finale.

Speaking to Hollywood Reporter, Gimple said, "They absolutely gave to find some place safe. Where we're leaving them off, they're not in a great situation. We have this group of people and they have nowhere to go. They have to find somewhere to go; and for what's been going on with them, someplace that they can stay. Carl was intimidating [sic] in the first half that we just keep moving along but Michonne wasn't terribly down with that idea."

Here, he's not really telling us anything that we don't know. As we already saw in the opening scenes of the premiere, the group is going to attempt to reunite Noah with his family in a gated community outside of Richmond, and Michonne will be the main driver for finding a safe haven for the group, rather than continuing to be nomadic. But then, even as he refused to outright confirm that this community represents the television show's version of the Alexandra Safe Zone, Gimple said that the series is "nearing that point in the comics where things change."

This is most likely a reference to Alexandria, because the change of location served as the start of a new era in the comics, particularly since the Alexandria Safe Zone has provided the longest-lasting home for the comics characters to date.

Gimple went on to "hypothetically" discuss what an Alexandria plotline would look like: "Whenever we get to Alexandria, it will probably have stuff that's right out of the comic book and stuff that's different. There's a whole bunch of story that I want to hit in a lot of different directions and getting to [Alexandria], there's a ton of stuff that I'm eager to get to," Gimple says. "Stuff that is well beyond Alexandria. Then there's some other things we want to do to provide some underpinnings to those stories. To be able to play them even harder than we saw them originally."

He finally discussed the arrival of Negan, one of the most significant villains from the comics, whom the survivors meet in the Alexandria Safe Zone: "Negan in general is going to be challenging. It's such a story turn in the comic … There's a particular story in that arc that I'm very excited for. But because we know where we're going, we have some opportunities to play around with it and put some things in that will lead up to [Negan and Alexandria] in different ways yet fulfill the story Robert told to the nth degree by utilizing some slightly different approaches. Lineups and timelines and the whole nine yards."

The midseason premiere of The Walking Dead will air on AMC on Sunday at 9pm ET.